Video has long been recognised as an excellent medium for conveying ideas and communicating with audiences. The success of television and film in the past 90 years is testament to the appeal this medium has with human subjects.
Research shows that the medium of video of real world objects and people is a more natural form of interaction with human beings as opposed to computer-generated imagery, for example as found in the gaming industry. Users are more responsive and impulsive with the medium of video and the results which would be attainable would not be achieved through other media. The medium of real-world video elicits more accurate and real human reactions and emotive responses. For example, a user viewing video footage of a football match arouses more natural human emotions than footage of a football match being viewed via computer generated imagery (‘CGI’). Further, video media files can be easily applied to the fields of medicine, psychiatry, professional and amateur level sports, advertising and marketing as they are more widely accessible, commercially viable and time- and cost-effective.
However, controlling video is far more difficult than for example computer generated imagery. This is because with video, there is a need to give the appearance of a scene as being that which a subject viewing the video may see in real life. This is simply not the case with computer-generated images which are far easier to manipulate as they are often not seeking to present a real-world view which the user would see with their own eyes, but rather a view in a computer-generated world. Where computer-generated views do try to mimic a real world view, huge amounts of processing power are required and even to this day such computer generated imagery is discernible from video of real world objects and people.
Control of devices such as video playback devices such as video players or so called media players often involves the user of remote controls, keyboards or the use of on screen controls. All of these require active manipulation by the user (typically by manual manipulation) to effect control of the playback of video scenes for example. Such active control is a single point source such that there is one control for the manipulation. There is no current way of an audience collectively controlling playback of a video on a display. Even if this were to be provided it would require the user of handheld controllers for getting user feedback and then using that to control the video playback device. The difficulty with this is that the control (if present) requires the user to select manually a particular option on a handheld device to effect control of the video. Not only may some of the subjects viewing the displayed video select the wrong option, but in doing so they can be distracted from the video being watched.
Ideally, what is required is a way for a user to control the outcome of the video being displayed without the need for manual manipulation of devices or use of any device which detracts from the video being displayed. The problem needs to be addressed for both a single viewer of a video clip as well as an audience of the video clip. Also preferably this needs to be provided in a manner which suggests that the playback of the video is simply from a pre-recorded file not a series of video fragments which are put together in response to the user's control via their control.
It is desired to overcome or mitigate at least some of the above described problems.